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<h3><a name="toc">Contents</a></h3>
<ul>
<li class="level1"><a href="#what-versions-of-mac-os-x-are-supported">What Versions of Mac OS X are Supported?</a></li>
<li class="level2"><a href="#carbon-or-cocoa">Carbon or Cocoa?</a></li>
<li class="level2"><a href="#32-bit-or-64-bit">32-bit or 64-bit</a></li>
<li class="level2"><a href="#building-qt-statically">Building Qt statically</a></li>
<li class="level1"><a href="#day-to-day-application-development-on-os-x">Day-to-Day Application Development on OS X</a></li>
<li class="level1"><a href="#deployment-compile-once-deploy-everywhere">Deployment - "Compile once, deploy everywhere"</a></li>
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<h1 class="title">Developing Qt Applications for Mac OS X</h1>
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<p>Mac OS X is a UNIX platform and behaves similar to other Unix-like platforms. The main difference is X11 is not used as the primary windowing system. Instead, Mac OS X uses its own native windowing system that is accessible through the Cocoa API. Application development on Mac OS X is done using Xcode, available from the Mac App store.</p>
<p>After installing Xcode you need to download the command line tools. This is done in the Preferences dialog under the Downloads section. After installing, "clang" should be available on the command line.</p>
<p>You can also download the command line tools directly and skip the code download. Log on to developer.apple.com and look for "Command Line Tools for Xcode" in the download area.</p>
<a name="what-versions-of-mac-os-x-are-supported"></a>
<h2>What Versions of Mac OS X are Supported?</h2>
<p>Qt 5 supports Mac OS X versions 10.6 (Snow Leopard) and up. It is usually in the best interest of the developer and user to be running the latest updates to any version. We test internally against Mac OS X 10.6 and 10.7.</p>
<a name="carbon-or-cocoa"></a>
<h3>Carbon or Cocoa?</h3>
<p>Qt 5 uses Cocoa. Building for Carbon is not possible.</p>
<a name="32-bit-or-64-bit"></a>
<h3>32-bit or 64-bit</h3>
<p>Qt can be built for either x86 or x86_64. 64-bit is used by default. To select a 32-bit build, use the macx-clang-32 (or macx-g++32) mkspec. This is selectable at configure time: ./configure -platform macx-clang-32</p>
<p>The Qt build system does not support building unversal binaries directly. Instead, use the "lipo" tool to glue two Qt builds together.</p>
<a name="building-qt-statically"></a>
<h3>Building Qt statically</h3>
<p>Static builds are not tested.</p>
<a name="day-to-day-application-development-on-os-x"></a>
<h2>Day-to-Day Application Development on OS X</h2>
<p>You can develop Qt applications on Mac OS X using your favorite editor, but we recommend using Qt Creator or <a href="https://developer.apple.com/xcode/">Xcode</a> as they reduce your development effort to some extent.</p>
<p>You can build and run your Qt application from the IDE you are using, or build it from the command line using <tt>qmake</tt> and <tt>make</tt>.</p>
<p><b>Note: </b>You can also use the <tt>qmake -spec macx-xcode</tt> command to generate the .xcodeproj file, which is required to open your Qt project in XCode.</p><p>The output of the build process is an application bundle, which is a directory structure containing the application executable. The application can be launched by double-clicking it in Finder, or by referring directly to its executable from the command line, for example, <tt>myApp.app/Contents/MacOS/myApp</tt>.</p>
<p>If your application is a console application that you want to run from the command line only, you can disable the application bundle creation step by adding the following <tt>CONFIG</tt> statement in your <tt>.pro</tt> file:</p>
<pre class="cpp">CONFIG <span class="operator">-</span><span class="operator">=</span> app_bundle</pre>
<a name="deployment-compile-once-deploy-everywhere"></a>
<h2>Deployment - "Compile once, deploy everywhere"</h2>
<p>In general, Qt supports building on one Mac OS X version and deploying on all others, both forward and backwards. You can build on 10.7 Lion and run the same binary on 10.6 and up. The recommended way is to build on the latest OS version and deploy backwards.</p>
<p>Mac applications are typically deployed as self-contained application bundles. The application bundle contains the application executable as well as dependencies such as the Qt libraries, plugins, translations and other resources you may need. Third party libraries like Qt are normally not installed system-wide; each application provides its own copy.</p>
<p>A common way to distribute applications is to provide a compressed disk image (.dmg file) that the user can mount in Finder. The Mac deployment tool (macdeployqt) can be used to create the self-contained bundles, and optionally also create a .dmg archive. See the <a href="deployment-mac.html">Mac deployment guide</a> for more information about deployment.</p>
<p>Applications can also be distributed through the Mac App store. Qt 5 aims to stay within the app store sandbox rules. macdeployqt (qttools/src/macdeployqt) can be used as a starting point for app store deployment.</p>
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